Saturday, January 5, 2013

Spent the day taking a load of teenagers paint balling up in the foothills near where we live. Myself, I'm too old and slow for this game, but I can be the chauffeur.

Here the teenagers are as they should be - tired and hungry after getting themselves pelted with paint balls all day long.

While they did that, I took off in the opposite direction for a walk. The foothills are really nice this time of year, with cool weather and green grass. I stampeded a small band of cattle off this hill, as they apparently weren't used to seeing some middle aged guy puff up to them to say hello.

Later, at the crest of one small rise, I noticed that there was an Indian grinding hole in the rock at my feet, which you can see below. The local Mi Woks picked a great spot to mash acorns into paste, as the view was fantastic. I noticed three grinding holes altogether, one of which was almost invisible from filling up with dirt over the last 160 years or so.

Since this spot is remote in the sense that no one likely wanders by for years at a time, I decided to sniff around for the pestles, and lo and behold, I found two of them! Here is the best one, which I placed next to the hole it probably worked in a century and a half ago. It was probably last handled by the dusky maiden that set it down after using it to make acorn paste, and wandered away with the tribe, never to return.

Later, when the teenagers got home, they didn't have to pound their own food out of a hole in the rocks, but rather feasted on thick crust pizza their mother had ready when they trudged through the front door, exhausted. Both they and I considered it a great day, although for different reasons.